


A Way To Keep Me At Your Side

by tehtarik



Category: Supernatural, Wayward Sisters (TV)
Genre: Camping, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Language, Post-Episode: s13e10 Wayward Sisters, Some angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 08:23:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14209086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik
Summary: “This is about Kaia.”“Jody,” Claire nearly shouted. “Stop.”“Claire,” said Jody. “Not gonna stop.”There was that moment, that spot of silence when Claire just knew she was going to say something she’d regret. That moment when the wind seemed to stop in the grasses. The stream in the gulch below dropped out of earshot. And then everything crashed back into awful, jarring alignment, and Claire said the words.“Yeah, you really should. You should definitely stop being everyone’s mom all the time. Because you’re not and you’ll never be. So how about you shut the fuck up for once, huh? I said I’m okay.”---Kaia Nieves is dead, and Jody is taking them allcamping.





	A Way To Keep Me At Your Side

 

 

Jody suggested camping.

“Seriously,” Claire said, pulling the collar of her jacket over her long hair. She slipped further down the couch, her feet on the table. The tips of her sneakers nudged a mug of cold coffee inch by inch towards the edge. “ _Camping_.”

Jody scooped the mug up. “You want to spend the next two hours cleaning stains out of the carpet, be my guest.”

Claire elbowed Alex who was next to her. “Jody says don’t leave your cups lying around. Or you’ll be cleaning the carpet.”

Alex ignored her. She said to Jody, “I’ve got work.”

“You’re taking a holiday,” Jody replied grimly. “Besides, it’s only for three days.”

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Patience, who was leaning against the wall, arms folded.

Of course, Jody was just doing the mom thing, though more aggressively than usual. Maybe she was doing it for Patience, the new girl in the house. Maybe she really wanted to knit Patience into the seams of their scrappy patchwork weird-as-fuck family.

Maybe because they were one short and Jody was trying to overcompensate for this.

And really, who was Jody Mills if she wasn’t overcompensating for lost kids that could never fully belong to her?

Only Claire said it out straight, because fuck it, someone had to: “I don’t wanna go camping because it’s not going to solve any of our problems. Conclusion: it’s a waste of time.”

“No,” said Jody, “it really isn’t. Besides, I want to drive us all somewhere. It’s been awhile since I’ve been _anywhere_. Short haul hunting trips don’t count.” And she actually looked all distant as she spoke, with the kind of look that people have when they’re gone out of their bodies, into some daydream or other, and therefore were unavailable for any further argument.

Anyway, Claire along with Alex and Patience piled into Jody’s pick-up, early Saturday morning, laden with Doritos and pretzels and Claire’s favourite sour cola candies. Their backpacks and sleeping bags were thrown unceremoniously in the trunk, among Jody’s cache of knives and machetes and shotguns and tumblers of holy water, and the very small collection of assorted lore books, mostly withdrawn from public library collections.

Jody drove with her window rolled down, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping on her thigh, out of alignment with the bass of the Johnny Cash song on the radio. _I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I keep the ends out for the tie that binds_.

Sometimes she’d glance into the rearview mirror and flick a smile at Patience through her shades, or ask Alex if she was comfortable enough in the back seat. But she hardly spoke to Claire, who was riding shotgun.

That was OK for Claire. By God she was OK with that.

_I find it very, very easy to be true. I find myself alone when each day is through._

She mostly tuned out Jody, who was telling everyone about the most irrelevant and useless of stories. Nothing about ganking demons, no tips about dealing with creepy clowns or rogue angels or exorcising poltergeists.

No, Jody talked about other stuff. About how grand the Spires in the Black Hills looked. About huddling in an ice shanty on Horsethief Lake for three days, sticking minnow heads onto the hooks of lures and flash spoons, trying to catch walleye and trout. About the time she deliberately flipped over her kayak when she was fifteen, and then panicking, sitting upside-down and inhaling water, too frozen to remember to get her butt out of the seat and swim toward air. None of these things made sense to Claire, not because she didn’t understand or anything, but because Jody seemed to be talking at random, about everything except last week, except monsters, about everything except Kaia Nieves.

“Dad and I used to go kayaking one Sunday a month,” Patience said. “He never really liked it much, though-- but he did it for me.”

Jody cast a smile at the mirror, let it reflect back to Patience.

 _Yeah, good times_ , Claire wanted to say, _but didn’t daddy kick you out just a couple of weeks ago?_

Instead, she said: “You know, there’s a good chance we might come across a wendigo or a werewolf or maybe El Chupacabra while we’re camping. This whole thing might end up as a good old-fashioned hunting trip; then it won’t be a complete waste of time.”

Alex kicked the back of Claire’s seat. “Shut up, for God’s sake.”

“Hey, you know the stories,” Claire fake-protested. “Missing hikers and all that.”

“Claire,” said Jody calmly.

“It’s not like we go looking for trouble. But if it finds us--”

“It always finds us, doesn’t it?” Patience cut in, trying to be nonchalant. She had fixed her gaze out of the window. She sounded nervous, though.

“Trouble is the party that follows us, sister. The ghouls have been chasing me since one of ‘em took a bite out of my thigh. To them, I’m just a delayed meal.”

“Come on, Claire,” said Jody again.

“I got the scars to prove it.”

“Not what I meant. We’re going camping. Hiking. Not hunting.”

“I know what it’s like to be on both sides of the hunt,” Patience said again, and this time she didn’t sound so soft. “A wraith came after me and tried to suck out my brain matter and eat my--my psychic aura or whatever, remember? Same one that killed my grandmother.”

That made Claire feel like a dick. And resentful toward Patience, for making her realise that she _was_ indeed a dick. She hitched one leg up and tucked her knee beneath the scoop of her chest and chin and opted to shut the fuck up.

 _Wise choice_ , Alex’s expression seemed to say, when she glanced backward.

Jody drove them west on the I-90, out of Sioux Falls, out of Minnehaha County. Farms and towns all flat and dead as board games unspooled past the windows. The towns had names like Alexandria and Kimball and Plankinton and Pukwana. The dashboard read 80 miles per hour exactly, the needle never moving. Jody was a steady driver. There were blank stretches of yellow and green fields, corn and soybean, disrupted here and there by ancient looking silos scrawled with graffiti, and the odd water tower here and there, brightly painted gas stations, signboards and isolated motels. Then, just before the turn-off to Chamberlain, the pick-up rounded a bend and cleared the tree line, and the land broke open before them. The Missouri swerved into full view, the fluid sprawl of it, patched with various blues. Jody turned off the radio and drove straight over the bridge, though she slowed down quite a bit.

None of them said a word as they crossed the river. The bridge came to an end and still they drove, the prairie unfurling alongside them, toward the tawny hills and the raggedy line of pines in the distance.

 

* * *

 

There was that one time in the brief period of them knowing each other, when Claire found Kaia Nieves standing outside Jody’s house one night, with a whole lot of circles around her wrists. Most of them were string bracelets, lots of those colourful plaited friendship bracelets, rings and rings of them. There was other stuff as well, like a metal hoop, a paper hospital wristband, a porcupine quill bracelet which Kaia said she’d got from one of Derek’s friends at the Pine Ridge rez, and big rubber bands doubled around her wrist bones, probably cutting off the circulation to her fingers.

“You made those yourself?” Claire pointed at the woven friendship bracelets. As far as she knew, only eight-year-old Disney-princess worshipping kids wore those as part of their cutesy cults. “Why wear them at all?”

“Nowhere else to put them,” said Kaia, shortly. Clearly, she thought Claire was being invasive. And that she’d rather be anywhere else but here, in Claire’s presence.

Claire didn’t get angry or give up, though.

“Yeah,” she said. She touched the knife strapped to the inside of her boot. The other knife on the other boot. Brought out a switchblade from her jacket pocket. “I know what you mean. I got nowhere to store all this junk as well. Might as well just wear ‘em on my person.”

Kaia relented. The frown between her eyebrows levelled out. She held her hands up, rotated her wrists left and right. “Okay, fine. Since you asked. What do people have around their wrists, usually? Besides tacky jewellery.”

Claire thought a moment. “Dunno. Restraints?”

She hated anything around her wrists. She remembered being handcuffs when she was arrested for damage to public property (though Jody had bailed her out). Then there were the greasy hands of way too many sleazebags from roadside bars, grasping at her wrists and yanking her close, as they tried to ply her with booze, probably hoping to score some in back alleys rank with stale piss.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Kaia answered. “Derek told me they’d help when I go to sleep. With the Bad Place. They’re supposed to restrain me from walking too far in my sleep and then not ever waking up.”

“I guess they’re good for you then.”

“They barely work.” Kaia pushed her thick, fleecy hair out of her face, tried to use her ear as a clip. Claire resisted the urge to hold some of that hair for Kaia, stop them from casting shadows over her eyes.

Kaia said dreamwalking was like edging along painfully on tiptoe, like she was in stilettos that sliced her feet as she walked and wobbled, walked and wobbled. It was constantly tripping and stumbling and stabbing into a ground that broke beneath her, piercing through the skin of that world. And then falling through, sinking below the reach of oxygen, her windpipe garroted by the airless grip of the atmosphere of the Bad Place. The only world that she could reach. The only place that would have her.

And Claire thought her own life was fucked up enough.

“Hey,” said Kaia. She turned to face Claire beside her. She had a stark, angular face. Neck bones like spindly steep cliffs connecting crisply with the bluff of her chin, propping up her skull. Cheekbones that could mutilate. And yet the eyes that sat in Kaia’s face were not unfriendly. They were soft and large, like big insects torn free from their armour. They peeled Claire open, made her own self feel exposed and squirmy. “Did you say angels exist in this world?”

“They’re not what you’d expect,” said Claire. “Winged dicks, Sam calls them. My dad had one in him for ages while he was still alive—he was a vessel for that particular angel. That one’s not so bad, though.”

“Huh. For real,” Kaia said, disbelieving.

“And demons, too. And old Greek gods and witches and rougarou and djinns and vampires and shapeshifters.”

“And you hunt them?”

“And dragons,” said Claire, seriously.

Kaia laughed. She shoved Claire at the shoulder. “Fuck off.”

Claire nudged her right back. “For real, though. Not that I met one before.”

Kaia shrugged. She was still smiling. “World’s just got a whole lot bigger for me.”

“For me, too,” said Claire, without knowing what she meant.

“But really, no dragons, right?”

“There are totally dragons.”

Claire put one foot on top of the front tyre of Jody’s pick-up, which Kaia was leaning against. She didn’t quite know what to do. What the hell. She hadn’t known Kaia for long. Everything that had been happening was whirlwind-paced: Kaia being picked off the side of the road, trying to break out of a hospital ward, and then getting attacked by those interdimensional freaks from the Bad Place. And now that there was a moment of peace in the midst of all the fucked up shit of the world, a moment to catch some quiet, and here she was, feeling quite breathless and uncertain.

All Claire realised, somewhat numbly, was that hey, this chick wasn’t so bad. She kinda liked Kaia. Not in a romantic way or anything, maybe not yet. But for a strange girl who’d been on the run and who opened doorways in her sleep, she liked her a lot.

Maybe--maybe if Kaia hadn’t broken away from the sturdy frame of the pick-up, said, “I’m gonna go inside, you coming or what?”, then maybe some other thing might have been said. Maybe Claire might have opened up a bit more, maybe she might have clarified things both with Kaia, and with herself.

But she’d missed her chance. Because now with Kaia dead and gone forever, her body sealed off in some alternate reality that technically shouldn’t even fucking exist, there was only this sense of incompletion, of denial, of things that were in the way of happening, but could never now happen.

 

* * *

 

They set their tent up in the campground by Sylvan Lake, Jody directing them throughout the process. Stake down your corners, connect the poles, assemble the frame, secure the rain fly. It was like plodding through a boring sum, because Jody knew her shit.

Later in the afternoon, they went hiking. They trudged along the perimeter of the lake shore, and then took the trailhead that wound through groves of bull pine and quaking aspens. The air was sweet and spruce as they crossed grasslands dotted with purple flax flowers and yellow groundsel, and then they began to descend into the gulch, climbing down rocky banks and slippery ridges.

Jody was sunny, sunnier than usual, going ahead of the girls, and then doubling right back to Claire who was last in the line. She’d walk beside Claire a bit before going right ahead again. If she got any sunnier, she might as well be Donna Hanscum’s fraternal twin.

“Right,” Claire said, when Jody came clambering up toward her from the depths of the gulch for the thirtieth time. “Whose meat suit are you? ‘Cause this energy you’ve got is inhuman. It’s demonic.”

Jody laughed. “Once you climb out of the ravine you’ll be able to see the Spires. It’s a great view, and conditions are perfect today. Last time I was here was more than a decade ago.”

Ahead, even Alex was happy. And Patience, who came from a perfect and very normal home, found all this perfect and very normal. She and Alex were joking (Alex _actually_ joking) about something-- whatever it was, Claire didn’t know. She couldn’t hear much. There was an odd ringing in her ears. Nothing painful, just a deadened machine-like hum that didn’t even sound real, just something her stupid brain had cooked up. A numbing soundtrack to this whole numbing excursion into the wilderness.

At the bottom of the gulch was a stream, which they had to cross several times. There were still traces of ice, gleaming wetly between the crevices of boulders. The smell of rain caught in the leaves was pungent. A cold smell. Just ahead, something pale streaked through the trees. Probably a white-tailed deer. Patience whipped out her phone and started filming, swinging her screen side to side, trying to catch another glimpse. After awhile, she gave up looking for the deer, and began filming everything else. She filmed the small riffles in the creek, made some artsy angles on water dripping from the ferns. Filmed Jody talking. Alex deadpanning straight into the camera. The view around every bend in the trail.

They began to climb out of the ravine, and the trail turned steep. Alex, Jody and Patience went on ahead. Claire mostly dragged herself along. Her feet felt heavy, like her boots were filled with creek water and each step was dragging along a lake. The others disappeared when the trail curved around a large boulder. She stopped walking.

“Hey Claire,” Patience called from around the rock. “Jody’s right—the view’s amazing!”

“Told you all,” came Jody’s voice.

“You go on ahead,” Claire called after them. “I’ll catch up.”

To be totally honest, all of them could go fuck themselves. Claire didn’t want to be here. There was nothing out here. Nowhere. Trees. Sunshine. The sound of water in the gulch below. The flat singing in her head. The great fucking view around the fucking bend.

“Claire?”

It was Patience. She’d come back round the corner. There was an uncertain expression on her face, a gentle dip of her eyebrows that Claire didn’t like. She looked like she was pitying something, somebody.

“I said go on ahead and don’t wait up. My shoelace just got undone.” Claire dropped to her knee and pretended to fiddle about with her laces. Her shoelaces were still in their perfect knots. But along the bands of her socks was a spattering of dark red spots, just above her ankles. They were starting to itch real bad.

“Those are chigger bites.” Patience pointed at them. She rummaged around her backpack. “They’ll itch even worse if you don’t treat them. Good thing I packed some calamine lotion—thought we might need it.”

“Oh yeah,” said Claire before she could stop herself, “forgot you were one of those psychics. Must be real handy being you.”

She hadn’t meant to sound the way she did. She didn’t even know why she was taking it out all on the new girl. Probably because she, Claire Novak, was an asshole through and through. Patience froze a little, the edge a smile still snagged at the corners of her mouth. She continued fumbling around her bag and took out a tube without looking at it.

“Here.” Patience forced the tube into Claire’s hands without meeting her eyes. “This’ll help with the itch.”

Then she turned swiftly and sped up the track, sidestepping Jody who, surprise surprise, had doubled back yet again.

“Tell me something,” Claire grated out the words. “This whole camping shebang wasn’t just for me, was it?”

Jody didn’t flinch. Nothing made Jody flinch anymore, least of all any of the shit that Claire slung at her. “We all needed to get away for a bit.”

“ _I_ didn’t.”

“This is about Kaia.”

“Jody,” Claire nearly shouted. “Stop.”

“Claire,” said Jody. “Not gonna stop.”

There was that moment, that spot of silence when Claire just knew she was going to say something she’d regret. That moment when the wind seemed to stop in the grasses. The stream in the gulch below dropped out of earshot. And then everything crashed back into awful, jarring alignment, and Claire said the words.

“Yeah, you really should. You should definitely stop being everyone’s mom all the time. Because you’re not and you’ll never be. So how about you shut the fuck up for once, huh? I said I’m okay.”

“Wow. Okay.” Jody actually took a half-step back. She didn’t seem afraid or anything, but her her neck and shoulders tensed, the anger was building up in her, ready to be released like a spring. “I don’t think I deserved that, but okay.”

Claire regretted instantly. “Fuck. Sorry. Sorry, didn’t mean it. It’s me who needs to shut the fuck up. I’m sorry. Just–sorry—just forget what I said.”

She was an idiot. Because after all, this was fucking Jody Mills standing in front of her. Jody, who despite looking so pissed off, refused to lose her cool, kept her composure, unlike Claire, who had just told her to shut the fuck up. And really, how many times had Claire told Jody that –if not directly, then through her frequent and furious silences, her long closed doors, her long absences from Sioux Falls in the past years? How many times had Jody looked into Claire’s eyes and seen nothing but middle fingers in them? And when had Claire ever looked back at Jody, really looked to see the who, what, why, how that was Jody Mills? She never looked past and acknowledged the Jody she saw, the surface of Jody. The Jody beyond the short greying hair, the faded flannels, the ready smile and eternal patience, the steel in her knuckles when she had a gun squeezed tight in her hands, finger on a trigger.

Well, Claire found herself looking deep into Jody now. And realising that if Jody didn’t let her, she would never see beyond the steel, beyond the flannels, the edge in her teeth and eyes, the dry skin stretched over her bony hands that always opened to Claire, always. Because if Jody didn’t let her in, she would never know her, never see beyond the bleak twist of a woman, sheriff of Sioux Falls whose husband and child were murdered years ago, and yet here she was, carrying on with living, taking in lost girls like it was none of anyone’s business. Lost girls and idiots like Claire.

The gap between Claire and Jody collapsed. Jody held her as she cried gracelessly into her shoulder. For no fucking reason she cried. Well, maybe there was a reason, and it was Kaia Nieves, but it also wasn’t just Kaia. There was a whole lot of Claire in there as well.

She stopped soon enough, wiped most of her snot and tears on Jody, who didn’t complain at all, just ran her hands through Claire’s tangled hair which hadn’t been washed for two days.

“You know Kaia’s death is not your fault, right?” Jody sounded tired and thirsty.

“And you know that if it _is_ my fault, I can accept this, right?” Claire said. “I’m not a kid anymore, like you keep thinking.”

Of course that just made her sound like a kid.

But all Jody said was, “Then you’ll know when to let things go.”

“I’ll be fine.” Claire gestured ahead at the trail. “You’d better go, or Alex and Patience will be coming back to check on you.”

Jody nodded. She turned to go. Just before she rounded the bend, she spoke over her shoulder. “You know where the rest of us will be, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, you’ll all be here for me. Only told me fourteen times in the last week.”

“Yes, that,” said Jody, “but also back at the camp for dinner.”

She disappeared behind the boulder. Her boots rustled the grass, crunching on the stony trail, and then Claire couldn’t hear her anymore. In her hands was a tube of Colgate. Not calamine lotion at all.

 

* * *

 

Claire was right about one thing, which Patience hadn’t foreseen. The whole camping thing turned out to be an accidental hunting trip after all.

There were no wendigos or werewolves or even El Chupacabra. Just the average garden variety ghost. Which, for some reason, chose to haunt the campground’s toilet block.

At the moment, she and Jody were getting their asses kicked severely by the ghost, on account of it taking them both by surprise.

They had both gone into the toilets in the evening, only to witness the mirrors cracking with ice, and their breath condensing into freezing fog. The ghost, a man whose face had been distorted into a kind of eldritch anger, had a dark slit in its throat and black ectoplasm leaking from its eyes and from the gashes across its chest and stomach. The ghost threw them across the toilet block, against the mirrors which shattered. Jody’s head crashed against the side of the metal sink and she was down, blood wriggling a line out of the cut on her forehead.

“Jody!” Claire yelled, and Jody slurred a reply. She was fine. Claire shouted for help, for Patience, for Alex.

The ghost picked her up without touching her and flung her against the opposite wall. Her ribs creaked as she landed. Ectoplasm continued to seep out of its eyes.

She was levitated into the air by the its vengeful energy. An invisible rope wound around her throat, tightening. Claire Novak, about to get off-ed by a ghost. Huh. She had always betted on a demon. Or maybe smote by an angel, her eyes scorched to sizzling craters in her face.

Then it released her and she tumbled to the ground, her chin snapping against the concrete. The ghost flickered as Alex swung an iron crowbar at it. Red sparks leapt off the iron as it cut through the spectral essence. It refused to go anywhere, though, just kept fizzing and flickering.

Someone shouted, “Alex, get down!”

Alex dropped down beside Claire as three gunshots blasted through the space. Claire coughed and groaned, her vision bleary. The ghost was gone. Only Patience stood upright, a shotgun in her hands.

“I got the rock salt,” said Patience. She sounded dazed.

Jody had pulled herself to her feet. She mopped the blood from her forehead. “Good thinking, girls. But the spook is going to come back soon. It’s a pretty angry one as well, judging from all the black goo.”

A puddle of ectoplasm stained the floor.

“That was a Moaning Myrtle,” Claire said.

“A what?”

She shrugged. “Beats me. It’s what Sam calls any ghost that haunts a toilet. Must be some arcane hunter lingo or something.”

Patience lowered the shotgun. “I never—that’s the first time I saw a ghost.”

“So what do we do now?” Alex said, though she didn’t seem keen to find out.

“Look up the missing persons register,” Claire said. “Find the body. Salt and grill the bones.”

Patience looked at everyone in disbelief. Nobody said anything. And after a moment, she shrugged. She seemed to accept that that was exactly what they were going to do. No biggie.

Claire leaned against Patience’s shoulder. Patience looked astonished.

 _You sure about this_ , her expression said.

 _Get used to it_ , Claire wanted to tell her.

Instead, she said to Patience, “What did I tell you about the party, huh?”

Patience smiled wryly. “Actually, I think _we’re_ the party.”

That actually sounded great. Maybe not so true, but great all the same. The four of them were standing in a kind of loose circle, facing each other. They had their backs to the world, but that was okay, because they could see over each other’s shoulders, had each other’s backs covered.

“If everyone’s okay,” said Jody, who was starting to walk towards the door, followed by Alex, “then we’ve got work to do. Let’s go dig up some human remains.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> title is taken from the lyrics of the Johnny Cash song, _I Walk the Line_. However, I think the Halsey cover of the original song is better suited to the nature of this fic.
> 
> Thank you for reading. :)


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